Do we like Jay-Z?
Our score: 7 out of 10. He has backed marriage equality in his own words and been cleared in the one serious claim, but the Target deal and an old guilty plea keep him short of the top.
Shawn Carter is one of the most successful rappers and businessmen in America, but he does have a rap sheet, so to speak. In 2001 he pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault over the stabbing of a record producer at a Manhattan nightclub in 1999, and was sentenced to three years' probation as part of a plea agreement. It is old, it is one incident, and it is not a pattern.
The serious one is the 2024 lawsuit. A woman alleged, through lawyer Tony Buzbee, that Jay-Z and Sean Combs raped her when she was 13. Jay-Z called it a blackmail attempt and a shakedown, and it was voluntarily dismissed with prejudice in February 2025. In September 2026 the woman filed a sworn declaration saying she never met him and that her claims were false. Jay-Z denied it all along, and his malicious-prosecution suit against Buzbee and his firm is still going.
On the harm check, nothing nasty turned up. In a 2012 CNN interview he backed same-sex marriage, saying people can love whoever they love and that banning it is discrimination plain and simple. On his album 4:44 he put a track about his mum's life front and centre, and GLAAD's president praised it. When the NFL's Bad Bunny pick copped backlash last year, he said “They love him” and told people not to be fooled.
The knock is the money side. A Target-exclusive 30th-anniversary vinyl of Reasonable Doubt landed in the middle of a Black consumer boycott of the retailer, which began in February 2025 after it rolled back its DEI policy. At Yankee Stadium he answered the sellout critics with a freestyle, saying he “sold Yankee Stadium the hell out”. Where you land depends on whether you read it as a mogul brushing off a boycott or a bloke picking his battles.
Of the lawsuit, he told GQ in March that it left him with “uncontrollable anger”. He has stuck with the line that he was falsely accused and would rather fight than settle. That is his side of it, and the recantation backs it up, but it is not a court finding on the merits.
Honestly, the good stuff is thinner in the pages we could open than it is in real life, so credit where due is limited here. He is known for work on criminal justice reform and for lending his name to LGBTQ+ acceptance in a genre that has not always been kind. For a billionaire who could stay quiet, that counts.